


Binary Star

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Three-Body Problem [7]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, First Time, Multi, Polyamory, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 06:41:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28720647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: "'I've been thinking... we've been together for almost four years now, and I'll be turning seventeen soon, and... I think I'm ready.'"'Ready to…?' Katara gently prompted him; she was fairly certain she knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him say it out loud."Aang glanced at the door; it was open a crack so that they could hear when Hakoda or Malina summoned them for meals (and also just to be friendly). He didn't get up to close it—that would have been too conspicuous—but, satisfied that no one was immediately on the other side, he leaned toward Katara, lowered his voice, and said, 'To... have sex. The way husbands and wives do. Not that I want to get married right away! But... I do, eventually. And... I'm ready to be with you that way, now.'"
Relationships: Aang/Katara (Avatar), Aang/Katara/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: The Three-Body Problem [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515
Comments: 9
Kudos: 27





	Binary Star

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1 of this is mostly set-up, and takes place between Chapters 4 and 5 (yet to be written) of the previous fic in the series, [Dynamic Metamorphism](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25150258/chapters/60940858).
> 
> Chapter count and rating are a tentative estimate. Both might go up.

“So, Katara… I’ve been thinking.”

“No, you shouldn’t try riding the unagi again,” Katara said absently, not looking up from her work. Having just returned from the North Pole, she was transcribing her notes from the meetings she had held there: with Master Yugoda about training Southern waterbenders in healing techniques, and with Chief Arnook about the conditions under which the Northern Water Tribe would support the establishment of an independent multinational enclave centered in Cranefish Town.

“That wasn’t what I—”

“You also shouldn’t try to ride the serpent in the Serpent’s Pass.”

“What? I don’t want to do that, either.”

“Or the sand shark in the Si Wong Desert.”

“Katara—” he started to protest, then broke off and said, “Wait. There’s a sand shark in the Si Wong Desert?”

 _Oops, shouldn’t be giving him ideas…_ Katara finally turned to look up at him where he was standing beside her desk. “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous,” she said with a laugh (she hoped he didn’t hear its slight nervousness). “Whatever you were thinking about riding, you shouldn’t.”

“Why do you assume it’s going to be about riding a dangerous animal?”

“Isn’t that what you’re usually thinking about? Well, that, and you sounded hesitant about bringing it up to me, which made me think it was going to be something I wouldn’t like.”

“I don’t think it is. I mean, I hope it’s not.”

“What is it, then?”

“Can we both sit down so you’re not craning your neck up at me?”

She pulled her mouth to the side in a slight frown. “You’re making me nervous again…”

“It’s nothing bad, I promise. I just want us to both be sitting down.”

“Sure.” Katara propped her brush carefully on its stand, stood up, and walked over to the low table surrounded by cushions in the middle of their guest room in her father’s house at the South Pole. She knelt on one of the cushions, and Aang sat down cross-legged on the cushion next to her. “So, Aang. What were you thinking?” she asked lightly, masking a touch of apprehension.

“I’ve been thinking… we’ve been together for almost four years now, and I’ll be turning seventeen soon, and… I think I’m ready.”

“Ready to…?” Katara gently prompted him; she was fairly certain she knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him say it out loud.

Aang glanced at the door; it was open a crack so that they could hear when Hakoda or Malina summoned them for meals (and also just to be friendly). He didn’t get up to close it—that would have been too conspicuous—but, satisfied that no one was immediately on the other side, he leaned toward Katara, lowered his voice, and said, “To… have sex. The way husbands and wives do. Not that I want to get married right away! But… I do, eventually. And… I’m ready to be with you that way, now.”

Katara listened patiently to his stammering explanation, nodding her understanding. When he had finished, she asked, “Why now?”

Aang shrugged, briefly glancing away. “Like I said, we’ve been together for a long time, and I know you’ve wanted to, but you’ve been waiting for me to feel confident enough to take that step…”

“All right, but why are you feeling confident enough _now?”_

“I’m not sure. It just feels like… it’s time.”

Katara regarded him thoughtfully, her eyes slightly narrowed. “Does this have anything to do with Zuko?”

Now she thought Aang looked faintly guilty. “He’s not the reason,” he said quickly, edging on defensiveness. “I mean—I’m not saying I’m ready to sleep with you so that I can sleep with him.” They had agreed, soon after establishing their new relationship with Zuko, that Aang and Katara wanted to have sex with each other ‘the way husbands and wives do’ (as Aang put it) before either of them did with Zuko—a symbol of their intention to marry, raise children, and spend their lives together. Of course Zuko would always be a part of their lives, too, but necessarily at a greater distance.

“I didn’t think you were,” she said soothingly… though the suspicion had certainly crossed her mind, and Aang’s denial had done little to allay it. “But… you just spent a few nights with him, and you told me you didn’t really do anything, but you haven’t explained why. So it’s natural to wonder.”

Aang looked even guiltier. “Sorry, I’ve meant to explain things… we just haven’t had much privacy in the past week.” He glanced at the slightly open door again.

Katara sighed, following his gaze. “I know,” she said. She stood up to close the door; as she turned back, she assured Aang, “I think my father will understand.” Aang’s tense posture relaxed slightly.

Katara came back to sit on the cushion beside him. “So… what exactly happened with you and Zuko?”

“I… made a mistake. But it’s all right! He didn’t break up with me… or us. He just… wanted to slow down a bit.”

“What mistake did you make?” Katara asked gently, cutting through Aang’s evasion tactics.

“I… told him I’d wanted to kiss him since I was twelve—since he rescued me as the Blue Spirit. And he said he was worried that what I felt for him was still that little kid’s crush. I managed to convince him that it wasn’t—but he still said he wanted to wait until I turn seventeen to… you know… get off together. So we just kissed some more—maybe a little more intensely than usual—and then slept in the same bed. Again.”

“You never told _me_ that,” said Katara. “That you’d started feeling attracted to him then.”

“No. I guess you never… it never came up.” _You never asked_ , he had almost said, then switched to something less obviously defensive.

 _Nice save_ , Katara thought, and acknowledged, a little grudgingly, that she _hadn’t_ asked.

“You weren’t far behind me,” Aang said, tempering the lingering defensiveness with a teasing smile. “You said _you_ wanted to kiss him in Ba Sing Se.”

She returned his crooked smile and agreed, “He doesn’t permit much middle ground between loathing and fascination.” She tapped her fingers thoughtfully on the little table in front of them. “So… let me guess: you’re feeling the need to prove that you’re not a child anymore. To him, or to yourself?”

Aang groaned and buried his head in his hands, resting his elbows on the table. “You’re right, I am, aren’t I? To both of us… and you.” He looked up between his fingers and gave a deep and mournful sigh. “When you put it that way, it sounds like a self-defeating enterprise. If I feel the need to prove it, it can’t be true.”

“I don’t know about that. It seems to me that when you’re in the intermediate space between childhood and adulthood, you might be at pains to prove to others—truly—that you’re not a child… but it’s easy to get that confused with proving that you’re all grown up.”

“Is anyone ever ‘all grown up’?” Aang asked wryly.

Katara rolled her eyes and asked, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” She didn’t always have patience for Aang’s philosophical asides when they were trying to have a practical conversation… though in this case she acknowledged that the question had merit.

Aang gave her an apologetic, self-deprecating smile, which quickly faded back into a frown as he rubbed his forehead. “Now you’ve got me second-guessing myself. I thought I _did_ feel ready, but I don’t want to do something like that—something I know is important to you, and important to me too—just to prove a point.”

Katara pressed her palms together and rested her lips against her fingers, thinking. She knew that Aang’s sudden hesitancy was out of consideration for her feelings, and she appreciated his scrupulousness on her behalf, but she was also tired of waiting.

She’d asked Aang why he felt such apprehension around the act that traditionally consummated marriage, when the Air Nomads didn’t have a custom of lifelong monogamous marriage like that of other nations. He’d told her that there was no shame around sex among the Air Nomads, even though many monks and nuns abstained from it—along with other physical pleasures—in order to sharpen their focus on the spiritual aspect of existence. Few acts were taboo, as long as all participants consented, and children’s curiosity about the body’s possibilities was handled with patient honesty. The procreative act alone was treated as hallowed, and was forbidden unless those who undertook it were prepared for the weighty responsibility of bringing a child into the world.

Katara assured Aang that he needn’t worry about that possibility. The healers of the Northern Water Tribe had developed reliable methods of contraception—a necessity in an unforgiving climate where married couples often could not afford to feed more than one or two children, or did not wish to bring forth a child in the year after an especially lean season. But Aang explained that it was not so easy to shake the teaching that the act itself entailed a profound responsibility, and was reserved for partners who understood and accepted that responsibility. Curiously, it seemed, it was more difficult for him to overcome that conditioning when it was the _only_ sexual act hedged about with the mystique of the forbidden, rather than just the most significant among many.

“Here’s what I suggest,” Katara said after a long pause, during which Aang watched her anxiously. “Our fourth anniversary is shortly after the autumn equinox. Let’s plan a romantic evening…”

“Of course! We always do.”

Aang was, indeed, very good about remembering anniversaries and making them romantic. It was unfortunate that their birthdays and their anniversary were clustered so closely in the northern hemisphere’s autumn, but Aang compensated by inventing significant days to celebrate throughout the year: half-birthdays, of course, but also the anniversary of their meeting, their first near-kiss in the Cave of the Two Lovers, their first dance at the party Aang threw for his Fire Nation schoolmates.

“This time we’ll plan to do… something else romantic at the end of the evening. But it’s three months from now; you can change your mind anytime between now and then.”

“I’m going to see Zuko again before then, at the equinox,” Aang pointed out.

“And you’re not planning to do anything you wouldn’t have done a week ago, if things had gone according to the _original_ plan.”

“I know. It’s just…”

“You’d hoped that when you saw Zuko again, you’d be armed with new proof of your… maturity,” Katara filled in dryly.

“Well… yeah, sort of. Saying we have a revisable plan to, uh, ‘go all the way’ in a couple weeks doesn’t quite carry the same weight as saying that we’ve actually done it.”

“Ugh, I’m not a fan of that expression.” It was something they’d heard among the teens and younger twenty-somethings of Cranefish Town—employees in Lao Beifong’s factory, or volunteers in the security force that Suki and Sokka had helped train, with whom the members of ‘Team Avatar’ had gradually begun to forge bonds of fellowship. They were developing their own youth culture there, freer and more irreverent than anything Katara had seen in the Water Tribes, the Fire Nation, or elsewhere in the Earth Kingdom. They dressed in styles that scandalized their parents and probably would have killed their grandparents with shock; they played around with bending in ways that sages of all nations would surely say profaned the sacred arts; they talked openly about sex, even if they still couched it in euphemisms of their own invention.

“It’s useful, though.”

“I guess,” Katara said, eyebrows raised dubiously. “Anyway… you’ll have to go into your next encounter with Zuko with no more proof of maturity than that you’ve turned seventeen.”

Aang sighed. “It’s probably just as well. What happened last time—or didn’t happen—it was about the two of us; it’s not fair to drag you into it. And… when we ‘go all the way,’ I want it to just be about the two of _us_. Don’t make that face at me,” he added. “I’m not going to say ‘have penetrative sex’ every time we talk about it, even if that is technically correct.”

“Well, at least you’re not saying ‘bumping uglies.’”

Aang cringed. “An expression only Toph could love.”

“Oddly, since she doesn’t know why the body parts in question are ugly…”

“I think that’s why she likes it.”

Katara laughed, then put her hand over Aang’s. “We can go anywhere you want,” she said. “We could go back to Ba Sing Se”—where they had shared the first confident kiss that inaugurated their relationship—“or to Cranefish Town,” which was becoming, more than anywhere else, their home, and would surely remain so if Aang and Zuko’s new nation were founded and flourished there. “Probably not here at the South Pole, even though it _is_ where we met. I don’t want to have to explain to my dad why we’re not staying with him…”

“Oof. Awkward.”

“Very. Maybe we could ask Zuko to let us stay at the beach house on Ember Island…”

“I thought we didn’t want to get him involved?” Aang asked with a cautious smile.

“I don’t think asking him if we can use the house is getting him _too_ involved. We don’t have to tell him exactly what we want it for… at least not until later.”

“He could probably figure it out…”

“Well, then, maybe you don’t have to _tell_ him we have a revisable plan to, ahem, ‘go all the way’ in a couple weeks.”

“Where do _you_ want to go?”

“Hmm.” Katara considered the options she had named. All of them had advantages… though Cranefish Town would not be an especially romantic destination until they built a house in the place where they dreamed of living someday, on the lushly forested island in what Sokka was already insisting should be called Yue Bay (though Aang tried to convey to him gently that naming rights still belonged to the Earth Kingdom until a new multinational jurisdiction was established). Ember Island was beautiful and full of fond memories… but also uncomfortable memories of a still-uncertain relationship, and a kiss she hadn’t been ready for, under the shadow of a looming cataclysm.

“I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning toward Ba Sing Se. It feels like coming full circle, don’t you think?”

Aang smiled, genuinely, and it looked like the sun breaking through clouds. “I can see that,” he said, and he leaned toward her—a clear invitation, which she accepted, meeting him halfway for a soft, unhurried kiss.

When they parted, Katara flicked her eyes toward the closed door and said, “What say we take the opportunity to make out for a little while?”

Aang returned her mischievous grin. “Might as well seize the moment.”


End file.
